Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie – review

Glenn Gould rehearses for a performance at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1959. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

"We've got this nut, and everybody's talking about how absolutely marvellous he is." In such terms a publicist from Columbia Records in 1955 piqued the interest of Esquire magazine's music columnist, inviting him and a photographer to see what was going on in a church in Manhattan, recently converted to a studio by the record company. Neither the "nut" nor the music he was recording were widely known, but this was the beginning of the transformation of both into household names.

A string of magazine and newspaper interviews followed, America quickly becoming besotted with the confident, handsome and brilliant young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (right)and his debut LP recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations. But Gould was already markedly odd in his manner: gauche and abrasive, he was often absorbed by the increasingly arcane rituals with which he sought to control his personal environment. Journalists honed in on the archetype of eccentric genius, recycling the details of his absurdly low posture at the keyboard and the old sawn-off chair that allowed him to maintain it. Gould also suffered from poor circulation, and despite the hot June days would arrive at the studio wrapped from head to toe in overcoat, scarf and gloves, which he removed on arriving in order to immerse his hands in warm water. Body temperature, particularly of the hands, is important for pianists, but Gould's preoccupation bordered on the obsessive, feeding into his proto-paranoiac fear of physical contact.

The recording sessions and the LP that emerged the following winter gave birth to more than just the iconography of an individual artist. The traditional ontology of the recording process was also turned on its head. Recordings were no longer compromised documents of absent artists and their performances, but definitive, fully present encounters with musical works. Gould was among the first to see how advances in technology – such as the potential to create composite recordings from several different takes – vastly increased his creative freedom. Addressing the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Company a decade later, Gould spoke of the "awesome power" of recordings "over the people who listen to them … a power uniquely responsive to the technology of our day". The words were prescient. Live concerts became the memento, with performances increasingly measured by the impossible standards achieved in the studio.

Besides Bach himself, Gould is the central figure in Paul Elie's book, which tells the story of how 20th-century sound recording and distribution added a new dimension to Bach's music. The story of Gould's inspirational career and purposeful but troubled retreat from the concert platform into the recording studio is well known, but Elie's retelling is thoughtful and elegant.

Most of the figures he discusses can be claimed as pioneers of one kind or another in the transformation of Bach's music from an obscure part of the concert repertoire to a position of centrality in musical culture. The book begins in another church, All Hallows, by the Tower of London, where in the mid-1930s the German organist and missionary Albert Schweitzer spent several nights – the vicar wouldn't allow it during the day – recording Bach's great Toccata and Fugue in D minor and other works that passed from obscurity into ubiquity. Schweitzer was an international superstar; he saw the process of putting Bach on record as a vital moral imperative.

Elie also walks us through the recording careers of Pablo Casals, the great Spanish cellist who rediscovered and immortalised Bach's unaccompanied suites for solo cello, and Edwin Fischer, the normally fearless Swiss pianist, who was so apprehensive of the honour of furnishing the world with the first complete recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier that he kept fumbling his part. Also present are the great female Bach keyboardists of the middle of the century, the pianists Rosalyn Tureck and Myra Hess and the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who famously rebuffed a criticism from Casals by remarking: "You play Bach your way, I'll play him his way." We also encounter the British conductor Leopold Stokowski, who not only convinced Walt Disney to place Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor first on the bill of the 1940 Fantasia, but also ordained that the accompanying animations be the most abstract and non-figurative.

Elie's latterday heroes include the conductor and period performance champion John Eliot Gardiner. He also takes in figures on the wilder side of Bach interpretation such as Wendy Carlos, whose futuristic renditions of Bach on a single channel Moog synthesiser, released in 1968 under the canny title Switched-on Bach, speak so firmly of the 1970s that they were used as the soundtrack to much of the BBC's recent TV obituary of Margaret Thatcher.

Threaded through the book is a slowly evolving portrait of Bach as a visionary artist, filled with the desire to harness the latest technology and forms of expression to his artistic and liturgical aims. Seizing on the image of Bach as bent on illuminating the technologies of his day with the spark of the divine, Elie pushes hard against the prevailing view that human spirituality is threatened by scientific progress, obscured by technologies of mechanical and, now, instant digital mass reproduction. On the contrary, God, according to Elie, is as alive and well as ever, quietly inhabiting the cracks and fissures of lived experience.

But there's nothing here to frighten even the most aggressively secular of horses; Elie remains throughout a thoughtful guide. If the book misfires it is because he largely ignores the recent reversal of fortunes undergone by the music-recording industry, and the re-emergence, both in popular and classical music spheres, of live concert culture as the dominant economic and artistic force. Gould, though he tied his artistic identity to the art of recording more completely than any artist before or since, was also firmly aware of the way ubiquity breeds contempt. "As our dependence on [music] has increased," he said, "our reverence of it has decreased." As a young man Bach travelled 300 miles, mostly on foot, to the Danish border to hear the age's greatest organist, Dieterich Buxtehude. Nowadays we can access both Bach's and Buxtehude's entire extant oeuvre with a few taps of the keyboard. We may find something sublime in the gaps between the keys.